Ahead in the Heat

by Lorelie Brown

  That was enough for her. She spun on one booted heel and marched toward the back of the house, peeking in every room as she went. The kitchen was sleek and clean. The cabinets were glassed in, with an edge of chrome. He’d considered wood but wanted to avoid a cutesy feel. Even the fridge was glass-fronted, with stainless steel drawers beneath for the freezer.

  Annie whistled. “Jesus. Between the size of this joint and this room, I don’t even want to think about how much your maid service runs.”

  “I have a housekeeper.”

  Her mouth tucked into a smile on one side. “That doesn’t really surprise me, somehow. Is she a little old lady with gray hair who leaves a cake out on your birthday?”

  He snagged the bottle of pills from the cabinet next to the six-burner stove and leaned against the waist-high butcher-block-topped island. “Actually, she’s a he. A twenty-seven-year-old guy named Keiji who usually leaves a bottle of Patrón out on my birthday. He’s not one for cake, but he makes a really fucking killer chicken alfredo.”

  “Yeah. Okay, I suck for that one. Stereotypes for the win.” She winced and sighed, rubbing her fingertips over her brow. “Ugh, I feel like shit now.”

  He touched his knuckles to her upper arm in the gentlest punch ever. “Nah, don’t be so hard on yourself. I know Keiji is unusual. When I put out an ad for a housekeeper, I was expecting a little old lady too. Keiji was putting himself through his second year of college at UC Irvine and needed the money badly. Now he’s worked for me for eight years.”

  “He stuck around after he was finished with school?”

  “I pay really well.” As well he should. Sean’s standards were crazy high, and he liked his things in a particular order. Keiji had come with Sean from a rented apartment on Twelfth Street to this house once it had been built. Disruption was unnecessary.

  Seemingly without thinking, she grabbed a glass from one of the open-view cabinets and filled it with cool tap water. She set it in front of him, took the pill bottle from his hands, and then consulted both the dosage instructions and her watch. “It’s seven thirty. If one isn’t enough, you can have one more at eight thirty, as needed. Otherwise about an hour after lunch.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he teased. But when she tipped one capsule into the lid and held it out to him, he took it obediently. “I just don’t like how fuzzy they make me.”

  “If you don’t take them, your body has to concentrate on mitigating pain rather than healing itself. You’ll only delay the process. If you hurt, you take them. End of story.”

  “You’re a bossy little thing.”

  She grinned. “You bought bossy with your three mil. Feel like a good bargain?”

  His smile surged up in response to hers. “Depends. What are you doing here at half past seven?”

  “We’re going to have a purge.” She opened the door next to the fridge, obviously banking on its being a pantry. “Normally I’m an advocate of balanced living, including balanced eating. But if you want immediate results, you’re going to have to concentrate on a diet that operates at the highest possible nutrition level.”

  She was right, but his pantry was basically stripped bare compared to the average person’s stores. Sean didn’t cook much, preferring to dine out at expensive restaurants. When he was home, he asked Keiji to cook with locally sourced, fresh products. It kept things easier, with the added benefit of avoiding stockpiling too much of anything in his house. “You’re not going to find a secret stash of Little Debbies, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  She flashed a cheeky smile over her shoulder. “Little Debbies are your weakness, huh? I’ll have to remember that for an end-of-treatment celebration.”

  He could think of something else she could give him for an end-of-treatment prize. Maybe something involving the ass she was showing off by bending at the waist to look at the lower shelves of his pantry. It was a small ass but sweetly curved enough for his hand. He had the instant, absurd impulse to pat her.

  Wouldn’t that go over well? She’d probably punch him. Or maybe he’d get off lucky and she’d just walk out, probably with several snarky comments. He hid his involuntary chuckle against a loose fist.

  She jerked upright. “What was that?”

  “Nothing. What are you looking for?”

  “No particular item. I’m trying to get an idea of your general taste and where we can proceed from here.” She poked around in his fridge next, and that made his back teeth set on edge. He wasn’t used to anyone touching his stuff. Which, Christ, sounded way too much like his mother talking inside his head. He took a slow, deep breath and pushed it out again. This was no big deal. Nothing to worry about.

  Possessions were simply objects, nothing more. They weren’t memories in solid form, and they had only the emotions people imbued them with. That was it.

  Pity his mom had never been able to think of them like that.

  Chapter 4

  Annie had never been in a house quite like this one. It was . . . gorgeous. There were no two ways about it. Sleek and modern, every line was intentionally chosen for maximum impact. Glass glittered everywhere, but it didn’t make the space feel cold. Touches like the butcher-block-topped island stretching seven feet through the center of the kitchen warmed the rooms. An abstract mosaic with Moroccan flavor topped the archway leading into the dining room.

  The contents of the kitchen had been a different kind of surprise. She’d expected plenty of junk food, metabolized by his obviously devoted surfing career and crammed in among dinners out. Most of the pros she knew from her days before school had been like that. They’d justified eating crap and drinking their brains out by the fact that they surfed or swam or skateboarded five hours a day. They didn’t take into account the long period spent chilling on their boards, floating on the water as they waited for the “perfect” set, or the long-term detriment to their cholesterol, kidneys, and liver. Especially their livers, considering the drinking.

  She’d been there. She surfed with the best of them, for a while. The levels of indulgence were infuriating.

  She should know. When she was fifteen, she’d been seduced by the bright lights of going pro. There was a well-trod path to the goal of sponsorship. She’d kept on that track for three years.

  Getting screwed over in an epic way tended to clean the stars out of a girl’s eyes.

  It wasn’t as if a gorgeous house like this would have come if she’d gone pro, anyway. The women’s circuits had less than twenty percent of the prize money of the men’s World Championship Tour. She’d have been fighting for accolades and attention, and that wasn’t enough for her, considering the costs demanded in return. She needed more.

  She needed to do more.

  So she’d used surfing to nail a scholarship to UC San Diego. While she was there, she’d surfed her ass off in the National Scholastic Surfing Association for her team . . . but once she was done, she was done. She’d walked away from any hint of pro surfing and taken her shiny new degree off to med school. It had been the right thing.

  Pro surfers had drive that took them to a higher level—and mowed over everyone around them on the way up.

  But Jesus, if it got them houses like this, maybe she’d made the wrong choice. “Where do you keep the alcohol?”

  He was so annoyingly smug sometimes. He slung a thumb in the pockets of his perfectly tailored slacks. “Why do you assume I have booze?”

  She shot him a look that said she wasn’t born yesterday. “Puh-leeze. You’re Sean Westin. You’re in the tabloids every other month, photographed at expensive clubs, with expensive women and expensive booze.”

  “Don’t assume. Who’s to say those glasses aren’t filled with tea? Or tonic water with lime?”

  Her stomach dropped. Had she misjudged him? She’d gotten enough of that shit herself, people who assumed her slightly tomboy look meant she was gay or butch o
r a shoplifter or antisocial. It sucked, but she’d learned the hard way that living for other people just wasn’t worth it.

  But then he broke into a laugh. Lines spilled out from the corners of his eyes. “No, I totally drink. No sainthood here. There are two bars in the place. A wet bar in the study and a less formal one on the lanai.”

  “Let’s start at the lanai,” she replied dryly. Keeping up with him had her on her toes, and that wasn’t only referring to matching his long-legged stride.

  At least following behind him meant that she could check out his ass. While she was fully aware that ass checking was the last thing in the world she should be doing as his physical therapist, it was a little difficult to strip her gaze away from that tight curve. His slacks were a fine material that pulled taut over his bum when he twisted open the sliding glass door. Damn, he dressed nicely.

  If professional surfers usually dressed like he did, maybe she’d been hanging out with skaters too long. Her friends all wore board shorts and cargoes. Sometimes jeans appeared if the weather dipped below forty-five degrees. None of them had button-downs like the one stretched across Sean’s shoulders. He was insanely fit, which went to show poor choices could make even the most fit susceptible to injury.

  Man, she was going to have a hard time keeping herself together when he was undergoing physical therapy. At least she didn’t have to be the one to administer it herself. She’d be a horrible therapist if this was how she looked at patients.

  Not that any of them looked like Sean Westin.

  Not that any of the men in the entire world looked like Sean Westin.

  Annie’s whole living space could fit into Sean’s lanai. Considering that she lived on the upper floors of the same building that held her business, it wasn’t saying that much, but she suddenly realized why this room was called a lanai instead of a patio. It had a roof, for one thing, and walls along two sides, though they were open-framed and lined with Japanese-style screens that would be enough to keep a neighbor from peeking at anything going on inside.

  The furniture was low to the ground and upholstered in pale white cottons to match the screens. They’d be the perfect chairs for Sean to throw himself into after a hard surfing session. The bar wasn’t hidden along a back wall, but instead installed as a central feature. It looked like something from a Blade Runner set, sleek black and knee-high with a recessed door in the center that was likely a fridge. The round arrangement would allow guests to grab what they wanted instead of having a designated bartender.

  All of it paled compared to the space where the third wall would have been. Except anyone who’d put up a wall there would have to be smoking something made out of sinus medicines in the back bedroom of a trailer.

  The only frame the room needed was the perfect, impeccable, gorgeous view. The water. The ocean. But more than that. It wasn’t just Oh, look at that blue strip like so-called ocean-view houses in certain neighborhoods. Sean had a beach. He had white, pure sand that stretched for a mile north and two miles south.

  Even the waves outside his lanai were perfect. He could grab a board, walk to the water, then paddle out into a right break that was currently six feet high on the front. “Jesus,” she breathed.

  “Makes you wanna hit the water, right?”

  She might have expected him to be smug, but it wasn’t there. His lips were slightly parted. His eyes were as wide as they went. Only in its absence did she realize the tension that had been held at his blade-high cheeks. He was softer here, looking at the ocean. Maybe he was one of those few people who actually seemed to understand the power the dark green water held. There was magic out there. Magic most people couldn’t touch.

  Magic she hadn’t felt in a long time. “Wouldn’t know. I haven’t surfed in about five years.”

  He gaped at her. There were no other words for it. His carved jaw dropped and his whole body shifted toward her. “Are you serious?”

  She shrugged, though there was so much tension across the back of her neck, it felt as if she were grinding glass together. “Haven’t needed to since college.”

  He shook his head a little, then passed his free hand over the top of his skull. He scraped blunt nails through his short hair. She wondered what that hair would feel like under her palms. Probably scratchy. Maybe she’d get a little tickle. Definitely a lot of tingles. They’d probably work up her arms and into her chest.

  Fuck, she was such an idiot.

  “Surfing isn’t about need,” he said in a voice implying she might as well have spoken in Farsi. “Surfing is about a drive.”

  She pulled out the first three bottles lining the bar, and aimed her most beatific, bullshitting grin up at him. “Then I don’t have the drive. Besides, I have my teens to think about. It’s easier to keep an eye on five kids if they’re all skating in my backyard. Our hiking trips are difficult enough in terms of logistics. Taking them to the beach would require different transportation, and I’d have to be stricter about maintaining control over them. Plus it’s harder to store a surfboard than a skateboard.”

  Something dark flitted across his features. He hadn’t shaved, so a shadowy growth covered his chin and jaw, but it did nothing to hide the twitching muscle. “I’ll give you that one.”

  She sat back, spreading her elbows out on the armrests. It was probably the most comfortable patio furniture she’d ever planted her butt in and that was just not fair. She had kids who struggled to have enough to eat every day. Sometimes the snacks she provided would be the only calories they got. And Sean Westin probably dropped ten grand on decorating a lanai.

  “Really,” she said, dragging out the word to an obnoxious level. But her speech sped up, faster and faster as she went along. “What exactly does a world championship surfer know about hiding boards so an obnoxiously drunk stepfather won’t break it out of spite? That happened, you know. A boy named Mike stopped coming to my place after that, even though I got him a new board. He just gave up.”

  The crystal clear blue of his eyes muddied into something more like a dark river than the ocean at Cancun. She hadn’t thought him capable of such changeable moods. The papers and talk about San Sebastian made him out to be way more of an affable, carefree playboy. He was the kind of guy who liked to have fun, and most everyone on the surf circuit loved him for it. “Maybe I didn’t have a drunk stepdad, but my mom had her own problems. I kept surfboards at other people’s houses most of the time. Usually they believed me when I said it was because they lived closer to the water.”

  “What was the real reason?”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, he shut down. His eyes had been dark before, yeah, but that wasn’t the same thing as blank. His mouth lifted in the shape of a smile, but it wasn’t a real one. Even his posture changed as he rocked back on one heel. “Eh, there’s no reason to get into that.”

  She didn’t believe him for a second. There was a deep dark kind of thing behind those words and their studiously casual tone. But sometimes it was easier to get hints and work around to the truth later. Her clients didn’t always realize that they’d come to her for more than physical therapy. They needed whole-life overhauls.

  She was just the woman to give him one. She smiled, pushing the bottles toward him. If he wanted to let it go, fine. For now. “There’ll be no alcohol for the next eight weeks. How we go about it is your choice.”

  “What do you mean?” He almost seemed to hide a sigh of relief, but she had to be mistaken.

  Sean might want to believe he was mystery and danger wrapped up together, but she was starting to think he was a whole lot easier to read than he wanted to be. “Either we pour the bottles out right now, together, or we load up my car and I store them for you.”

  She liked giving clients this choice. Their answer usually gave a deeper insight into their relationship with alcohol. Sometimes it was the easiest way to find out if they were closet alcohol
ics. Their choice didn’t matter, but the way they delivered it absolutely did. Sean was frequently seen in clubs and had been in at least three bar fights that she’d heard of in the past two years alone. That wasn’t even counting his current injury’s being due to a bar incident that put his career in danger.

  But he only gave a little shake of his head. “Really doesn’t matter to me. It’d be some cash outlay to buy again once I’m better, but it’s not like I have special scotch or fifty-year-old wine. I’m not really a wine type at all, for that matter.”

  “Wonderful. If it’s all the same to you, then, I’d rather we pour them out. I could keep them safe at my house, but they would have to be locked up in my bedroom. I’d rather not bring that sort of temptation to my kids’ doorstep.”

  He gave another of those soft, slightly wondering smiles. Her stomach flipped, and she told it to shut the hell up. He was absolutely not looking at her the same way he’d looked at the ocean. That was ridiculous.

  “You call them your kids,” he pointed out. “But they’re not, right? None of them are yours biologically? They’re teenagers who attend an afternoon drop-in center.”

  “That still makes them mine.”

  Chapter 5

  Three days later, Sean had managed to drag Annie out to the beach. When she admitted that she hadn’t surfed in five years, it had become his obsession to get her on the waves. He couldn’t even fathom that. The idea was simply absurd. Who in the name of God would pass up on surfing when they were good enough to have been on a university team? He also knew players who’d come out of UCSD. They had high standards. Pros had been known to surf for them after their careers had ended, while they got degrees to carry them forward in life.

  Annie had been that good and walked away. There had to be a story behind that.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t his story to figure out.

  She was his physical therapist. There was nothing in her job description that said anything about talking or having fun or dropping intimate secrets. It was better that way, since his secrets were of the incredibly distasteful variety.